It’s great to puff your chest now and call for transparency to “speed recovery in the housing markets,” but as the saying goes, ‘It’s a day late and a dollar short.’ Scratch that—it’s a few years too late and billions of dollars short.

While recovering, housing markets across the country are still reeling from the 2008 collapse, and every minute wasted on these ‘independent’ reviews is time that is not being spent fixing the larger problems at hand, including the giant mess that is Wall Street.

Many of the politicians demanding a thorough examination of the Independent Foreclosure Reviews are people I respect tremendously. That being said, we are so far beyond the 8-ball, that I wonder if the transparency they are demanding is actually attainable.

For starters, we’ve heard this kind of promise before, and it rarely seems to pan out. Second, the very same government that claims to be looking out for homeowners is still too intertwined with Wall Street’s interests.

I got an E-mail from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce hailing a decision invalidating the president’s 2012 recess appointments—including the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—as a landmark victory and an “incredible win for the employer community.”Continue reading→

Roy Oppenheim’s commentary was originally published on Yahoo Homes!and is being redistributed on South Florida Law Blog with their permission

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

We already know that the banks haven’t learned from their mistakes. They can and often will engage in risky behavior given the opportunity.

So why do regulators and those who have the chance to do something about it continue to give banks the wiggle room? Wall Street’s business model is inherently flawed, which is why banks are continually getting hit with hefty fines.

Yet banking lobbyists continue to hold immense clout in shaping regulation that will have a lasting impact on housing for years to come.

The business pages have been littered with headlines lately suggesting that governments still treat the banks like E.F. Hutton. When they talk, regulators still listen; case in point, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision easing up on certain liquidity requirements in the Basel III rule. There is a great deal of dense technical jargon that will quite frankly bore most of you but the takeaway is this — banks still get their way and will still be able to take as many risks as they want.

Roy Oppenheim’s commentary was originally published on Yahoo! Homesand is being republished on South Florida Law Blog with their permission.

It is easy to call Wall Street a villain and lay the blame for the housing collapse at their doorstep, and I did just that in one of my recent blogs, where I likened the banks’ conduct during the housing collapse to “economic homicide.”

My Rabbi asked me to further explain the concept of foreseeability, a notion I touched on in the blog, as it relates back to the banks and the real estate bubble.

So allow me to explain, but first, please grant me a few more hyperboles.

If you pour gasoline on a fire, then you’d have to know that fire would accelerate. Otherwise people would think you are a fool.

Likewise as people often refer to the real estate market as a bubble, I like to think of the banks and their agents as people who filled that bubble with helium.

At some point they’d have to know it would burst. It was absolutely foreseeable. So how did they “fill the bubble?”

First, they completely disregarded underwriting guidelines. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and most of the big banks took shortcuts, playing fast and loose with guidelines they once held sacred.

They signed off on these loans without considering their underwriting obligations, without checking whether the borrower was creditworthy, or even checking tax returns. More loans went out, and into the securitization machine, but of course the quality of those securitized trusts ended up resembling something your dog might leave behind on the sidewalk.Continue reading→

Here’s the problem: for people like myself on the front lines of the real estate market, the fiscal cliff is not some imminent threat, it’s already here.

When it is all said and done, DC’s landscape is almost identical to what is was before Tuesday, and the very same problems that were ignored during the election are now staring us right back in the face.

Let’s be real, Thelma and Louise are inches away from driving over the Grand Canyon. That is where we are right now with the housing market. I am not trying to scare anyone, but for those of us on the front lines of the housing crisis, there are some troubling signs.